Ghost Hand

by Ripley Patton

  Nose’s gun.

  There was no way in hell I was crawling back to get it.

  I turned to the door.

  “We’re going in,” I said to Nose and opened it.

  32

  THE DARK MAN’S LAIR

  Whatever I had expected, it wasn’t the room laid out before me.

  Marcus was lying in a hospital bed near the far wall, handsome but strangely pale, his eyes closed, white sheet carefully folded at the top and tucked across his bare chest. The only thing that distinguished the scene from every soap opera hospital tableau ever filmed was the gaping hole in the patient’s chest peeking out above the top of the sheet.

  Beyond Marcus were two more hospital beds.

  Emma was in the closer one, clearly unconscious as well, with a tube trailing from under her sheet to an IV stand next to her bed.

  And in the third bed was Passion Wainwright.

  She had an IV too. But she was awake.

  Passion looked past the tall, lean man standing at her bedside in a white coat. As her eyes caught mine, and a small smile of recognition flitted across her lips. She raised one hand, her wrist crisscrossed with angry, welted, barely-healed cuts, and gave a little wave.

  The doctor turned.

  Dr. Fineman turned and smiled at me.

  “You made it,” he said with the Dark Man’s accent. “I’m so relieved. We were beginning to worry.”

  “She’s hurt,” Passion slurred, sounding drunkenly concerned. And then more perkily, “but she brought a visitor.”

  “I told you she would,” Dr. Dark Man said.

  “You said there would be more,” Passion pouted, flopping her arms a little. She wasn’t drunk. She was drugged.

  “Yes, well. It can’t be helped,” the doctor said. “I’m sure the rest will be coming along shortly. We’ll just have to make do with these two, for now.”

  “You!” I blurted, my brain finally grasping onto that one word. This could not be real. It had to be a nightmare. Maybe Nose and I were still knocked out, lying in pools of our own blood in the razor room, and this was the terror my unconscious mind had decided to run with—all my personal fears rolled into one horrible scenario. Emma and Marcus helpless. In a hospital. With an evil doctor who just happened to be the Dark Man. And dating my mother. And, of course, throw in Passion, scarred and smiling at me. This was way too twisted to be real.

  “Olivia, I know you’re upset. This must be very confusing,” Dr. Dark Man said. “But you’re bleeding quite heavily. And so is your friend. Why don’t you let me tend to those wounds, and then we can all have a nice, calm chat.”

  “Chatty, chat, chat,” Passion said, her head lolling against her pillow as she closed her eyes.

  Dr. Dark Man moved in my direction, past the end of Emma’s bed, his empty hands held out to show he was unarmed.

  “Stay away from us!” I screamed, holding my ghost hand out in front of me like a gun. Behind me, I heard a noise—Nose sliding down the doorframe, his body coming to rest gently against the heels of my boots. Couldn’t anyone stay conscious long enough to help me even a little? It was like I was living in a world of narcoleptics.

  “He needs my help,” Dr. Dark Man said, the picture of concern.

  “Fuck that!” I yelled. “Fuck you!” My whole body seemed to be shaking, blood dripping onto the floor. “These wounds,” I said, holding out my ravaged hand and arm, “are because of you, you sick motherfuck.” That word had never seemed more appropriate. “This is all because of you.”

  “Really?” he said, crossing his arms over his chest like a disgruntled parent. “This is all because of me? That’s odd. I thought it was all because of you.” His voice ground hard on the “you.” He was losing his phony bedside manner. “After all, I’m not the one who stuck my hand into poor innocent Passion here and pulled out her insides. I’ve been trying to clean up that little mess of yours ever since you made it.”

  “I—what—how?

  “Oh yes, I know all the mischief you’ve been up to, my dear. First there was the huge PSS spike on our meters, which I traced back to your school. Then Passion came to the emergency room and shared with me, her physician, some very strange “memories” associated with that incident. Sadly, she hadn’t felt she could share them with her therapist—conflict of interest—you understand. And then, lo and behold, your Fire Chief brought me your backpack full of very odd razor blades. Blades that amplify PSS resonance, among other things. It didn’t take a genius, though I am one, to put two and two together. After that, it was only natural that Passion should fall under my specialized care. Her parents seemed quite relieved to have her taken off their hands.”

  “Who the hell are you?” I said, my head spinning a little.

  “I am Dr. Salvador Julian, the world’s premiere PSS research specialist. I’m also the only one who can help you with your hand.”

  “Help me by killing me? No thanks.” My bleeding was slowing, and I was feeling a little less lightheaded.

  “Kill you?” He seemed startled by the idea. “Why would I want to kill you?”

  “You tell me. Why did you want to kill Marc—David’s sister?”

  “Danielle?” he asked, sounding almost pained. “I didn’t want to kill her. Nor did I do any such thing. But she died, yes. Leukemia is a truly tragic illness, especially when it strikes the young.”

  “Leukemia?” I repeated, glancing at Marcus lying in the hospital bed. What he’d described out there in the sycamore tree, the slow death of his sister; it had sounded just like my dad’s death. Was this another one of Marcus’s well-fabricated lies? Could his sister have died under the care of Dr. Julian, not of PSS extraction, but of leukemia? It was possible; Marcus had lied about everything else.

  From behind Dr. Julian, a flash of light caught my eye. In the bed, under Marcus’s sheet, a pulse of blue light flared and went out. He was rebooting. Maybe when he came back to life, he’d tell me the truth for a change.

  “She didn’t die of leukemia,” I said, moving a step toward Dr. Julian to keep his attention on me. “You killed her by sucking out her PSS. And you burned down my house,” I reminded him. “I know you tried to kill me. I was there.”

  “Yes, well, that was unfortunate, but I wasn’t trying to kill you,” he said, dismissively. “I simply arranged for you to end up in the hospital under my care.”

  “Arranged?” I choked on the word. “By burning my house down with me in it?”

  “That was your overzealous fireman, not me. How was I supposed to know you small town Americans are so barbaric? Still, in the end, it was effective, if not efficient. And everything would have ended there, if you’d only done what was asked of you. If you’d let me run those tests and take my sample.”

  “Take a sample?” I didn’t believe that. It certainly wasn’t how Marcus had described PSS extraction, but I asked because I wanted to keep the doctor’s evil rant going a little longer. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the strobe of Marcus’s PSS flashing faster and faster.

  “Yes, a sample. This is what I do. My life’s work. I sample and categorize PSS signatures for research purposes.”

  “You just take samples?” I asked, trying not to look at Marcus. “That’s why you came to my town, and got a job, and dated my mom, and kidnapped my best friend, and made a fucking pain machine out of razor blades in a room under Mike Palmer’s garage. Just to get a sample. What kind of idiot do you think I am?”

  “I don’t think you are an idiot, my dear girl, but I do think you are a very difficult patient. I had hoped we could come to an understanding, especially after you provided me with those wonderful blades. Truly remarkable. I’ve only just begun to understand what they can do. I thought perhaps I could persuade you to extract more such items for me. But it seems, as usual, that you insist on doing things the hard way.” He reached into his coat pocket, pulled out a minus meter, and pointed it at my hand.

  Of course, I had known it was coming, but I hadn�
�t counted on my body being so sluggish when I tried to jump aside. My boots slid in the blood at my feet, and I flew backwards, landing on my back with a wet smack. The hard cement floor knocked the wind right out of me, my ghost hand flailing in the air. At least my head landed on Nose’s back, instead of hitting the floor.

  A noise like a bug-zapper filled the air.

  A stream of light shot out of the minus meter toward me.

  Pain erupted in my ghost hand, just like in the razor room, cutting me, killing me, ending me, except this time one thing was different. The pain wasn’t trapped inside my hand. It was moving away, being pulled out my fingertips, leeching out of my wrist as my ghost hand elongated and stretched toward Dr. Julian. The pain hung in the air between us as my PSS unwound away from me. Away from me. Away from me. Take the pain away from me. If he took my hand away from me, maybe the pain would go with it.

  Through that wall of pain, I saw Marcus and his beautiful PSS chest rise up behind Dr. Julian and grab him around the throat.

  The bug-zapper sound sputtered and stalled.

  Something let go of my ghost hand, and the pain receded.

  Dr. Julian and Marcus wrestled on the floor, Marcus’s muscles rippling, his PSS a steady blue glow. Dr. Julian was trying to get the minus meter between them. Marcus pried back Dr. Julian’s arm, pushing it away from his chest. They rolled, knocking over a tray of medical instruments that went crashing to the floor.

  Passion Wainwright sat up in bed and blurted out, “What would Jesus do?”

  I scrambled upright, slipping in my own blood again, leveraging myself against Nose and finally getting up.

  Dr. Julian was grabbing one of the sharp medical instruments in his left hand. Marcus didn’t see. He was focused on protecting himself from the minus meter.

  I rushed forward.

  With my flesh hand, I grabbed Dr. Julian’s wrist, giving him my best estimation of the radial nerve pinch.

  Metal clattered on the floor.

  I sank my ghost hand into Dr. Julian’s back.

  He went stiff.

  I followed my hand into emptiness, into a landscape of nothingness. How could someone be so empty? If Jason’s insides had been a machine of anger and madness, Dr. Julian’s were the opposite. He was a void. An open space my hand needed to fill, but I could find nothing to grab hold of.

  “Olivia,” someone said, shaking me.

  “Don’t help me,” I said. I had something to do. Something to find. It was there, hiding from me. I could feel it.

  My hand groped, fumbled, reached, then closed over something hard, solid and square.

  I grabbed it, yanking it out.

  Dr. Julian slumped to the floor between Marcus and me.

  “I got it,” I said, holding up a smooth silver box the size of a Rubik’s cube.

  * * *

  I don’t know how long it was. A few seconds? A few minutes? Half an hour? I just know that Marcus was holding me when Jason and Yale crashed into the room. They practically tripped over Nose.

  Marcus got up and left me. He took something out of Yale’s backpack and held it to Nose’s nose, Yale and Jason looking on.

  “It’s not working,” Jason said. “Are you sure he can even smell?”

  “I don’t know,” Marcus said. “There’s a sink over there. Get some water and splash his face with it. Yale, take the smelling salts and work on the girls. Pull out their IVs first. They’re drugged, but we need them coherent enough to walk out of here.”

  Yale went to work unplugging IVs.

  Marcus came back and crouched next to me. “Are you okay?” he asked.

  In the background, Passion began softly humming, “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.”

  “No,” I said, looking down at the silver cube clutched in my hand.

  Jason doused Nose with a hospital pitcher full of water. Nose sputtered awake but still seemed out of it. Jason propped him up against the door frame and patted him on the chest. Then he turned and strode toward us, stopping to stand over Dr. Julian. “He dead?” he asked, gesturing with his gun.

  “He’s still breathing,” Marcus observed.

  I looked over at the man lying next to me. He was bleeding from the nose.

  “Then we should take care of that,” Jason said, pointing his gun at the doctor’s head.

  “Wait!” Marcus said, taking a step toward Jason. “Hand me your flashlight.”

  Without moving his gun, Jason reached in his pocket and handed his flashlight to Marcus.

  Marcus knelt down and pulled Dr. Julian’s eyelids back one at a time, flashing the light into them.

  “No pupil dilation,” Marcus said, looking up at Jason, “which means he’s alive, but not by much.”

  “So?” Jason said.

  “He’s not waking up any time soon,” Marcus stood back up. “I’m not saying you can’t kill him, but first we get the girls to safety.”

  “She fuck him up like that?” Jason asked, nodding toward me as he lowered his gun and took his flashlight back.

  Had I done it? I’d been trying to save Marcus, and Emma, and Passion, and myself. I’d been trying to—reach the cube.

  “Go help Yale,” Marcus said, ignoring the question. “I want us all out of here before any more CAMFers show up.”

  “But I get to kill him? You promise?” Jason asked.

  “I don’t care what you do to him once we’re out,” Marcus replied.

  “What about that thing?” Jason asked, gesturing his gun muzzle at the minus meter lying a few feet from Dr. Julian. “We takin’ it?”

  Marcus walked over and picked it up. “That’s strange,” he said. “It’s flashing like it’s still on.”

  “That’s flashing too,” I said, pointing above us where something that looked very much like a giant minus meter was fixed to the center of the ceiling, wires trailing away from it in all directions.

  Just as Marcus and Jason looked up, the lights in the room flicked off, then flickered back on in exact time with the pulsing of the minus meter in Marcus’s hand. And the one on the ceiling. Off. On. Off. On. Like a slow strobe.

  “What the fuck?” Jason said.

  “What the hell is going on?” Yale called, flashing in and out of view from across the room where he was helping Emma out of bed.

  Marcus looked around the room. I saw his face, one frozen frame after another as his eyes traced the wires running across the ceiling toward the exit door, toward the room of blades.

  “Shit,” he said softly. Then he was screaming, “Go! Go!” He shoved Jason toward the door. “Get the hell out. The room is rigged.”

  Jason didn’t hesitate. He didn’t even question. He turned and ran toward the door.

  Marcus grabbed me, yanking me up off the floor.

  “Get the girls out!” he bellowed. “Get them out.”

  I saw it all in still life. Shots frozen in time, like old photographs.

  Jason, like some war hero, lifting Nose over his shoulders.

  Yale, a slouched girl on each arm, dragging them along like a pair of rag dolls.

  Jason and Nose, half-swallowed by the darkness of the razor room.

  Yale and the girls leaning against the door frame.

  Then Marcus was propelling us toward the razor room too.

  “No,” I said, struggling to escape his grasp. I didn’t want to go in that room ever again.

  “It’s the only way out,” he said, shoving me forward.

  As soon as we stepped across the threshold, the PSS glow of my hand and his chest filled the room, refracting off the dangling razors, twinkling, sparkling, winking at us like a hundred sharp-eyed conspirators.

  In front of us somewhere, Passion said, “Oooh, so pretty.”

  We moved out into the room, weaving carefully back and forth, crawling and ducking to avoid the touch of the blades, but I thought I could hear them trembling in anticipation. They were already buzzing in my head. Whispering pain. Promising pain.

  In t
he middle of the room, at the curtain of blades, Marcus stopped and grabbed at my hip, tugging something away from me. He’d pulled my glove from my pocket, and he was wrapping it around his right hand.

  Before I could even protest, he reached up, clutching at the nearest razor blade.

  “No,” I said, trying to pull him back from it.

  Ahead of us, Jason and Nose had made it to the bottom of the stairs and were starting up.

  Yale wasn’t far behind, guiding Emma in front of him and pulling Passion after.

  I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. We were almost there.

  Marcus reached up with his left hand and hacked at the transparent cord attached to the razor using the sharp medical instrument Dr. Julian had tried to stab him with. The razor came away, its edge imbedded in the glove, and Marcus moved to the next one.

  “What are you doing?” I cried. “We have to get out of here.”

  “Just one more,” he said, hacking at another cord.

  The second blade came away and he pulled me through the gap he’d cut, running toward the stairs.

  We fell up the steps and tumbled out of the freezer into Mike Palmer’s garage.

  Marcus banged the freezer door shut, and we ran into the living room, slamming the garage door behind us.

  “Are we safe?” Yale asked, panting. Everyone was panting. Nose and the girls were slumped on the couch in a pile. Yale and Jason were bent over it.

  “I doubt it,” Marcus said. “We’re standing on top of a minus meter the size of a house. And he rigged the blades to it, like an amplifier or something. It has range.”

  “But it hasn’t done anything yet. Maybe it doesn’t work,” Jason said.

  “Maybe,” Marcus didn’t sound hopeful. “Or he just didn’t factor in how long it would take for something that size to power up.” There was fear in his eyes. I could see it. Fear, not for himself, but for the rest of us. This was the way he’d lost his sister. He could always reboot. He would come back. But we wouldn’t. I looked down at the silver cube I’d pulled from Dr. Julian. The things I pulled from people found their power in answer to my need, and I was very much in need. I needed us all to get away. To be safe and far away. But that was the bullet’s power, and it only sent things to Jason, which wouldn’t help at all. What I needed was an all-purpose bullet. One without that rule. A bullet that could function outside the box. Outside the box.